OK guys, i have to confess that i intentionally left something out up until now. I just wanted to see if anyone else would pick up on it. Some of you were mentioning the effect.

The bit i left out is that 3 phase A.C. is always transmitted through long distance cables in three's. You will NEVER see high tension power lines as a single pair of wires. They are only ever in three's because the three phases are 120 degrees out of phase with each other. The net effect is that the electromagnetic radiation, or 50/60Hz radio signal, is almost cancelled out completely. This is why if your a kilometre away from high tension power lines, your car radio won't hear the hiss anymore.

Effectively by running the three phase cables in parallel together with each other, the 50/60Hz signal will be dramatically reduced.

But telling you that bit leads me to a more advanced concept in H.V. electrical transmission. When you understand how the three wires cancel out each other, then there is another effect electrical engineers are always fighting but they never fully control - - Its called "Power Factor" and "Load balancing". Because power factor correction and load balancing are never perfect in H.V. electrical transmission lines, my original hypothesis still stands. The 50/60Hz buzz from planet Earth in space is still going to be mankind's loudest noise.

Power factor correction and load balancing would take a long time to explain but electricians deal with these effects every day. Anyone involved in electrical engineering will understand them. Look them up on Google if your not sure.

Power factor correction and load balancing are NEVER perfect, they ALWAYS "Lag" each other. This is the signal that we are broadcasting into space.

I see you keep thinking your AM radio is listening to 50-60 Hz. It isn't. It is listening to a spark gap transmitter. Something like a dirty insulator. Very very low power in comparison to what is being carried.

Want to see what is actually out there? First build yourself an antenna. 1/2 wavelength should be fine. Then put a simple detector on it, a diode. Now measure the output.

Gary,
Yes, i know what static car radio's pick up, and i have built crystal radios.

John.

On that crystal radio, did you put a 1/2 wavelength at 60Hz antenna? Ideally you would do a dipole, but an end fed will do for this test. Try a resonant turning coil and capacitor for 60 Hz while you are at it. Try and get a decent ground too.

Yes, That's the point, Even higher frequency transmissions which will carry through the air quite well can not compete with low power interference at broadcast frequencies if they themselves are low power. Even though there are billions of kilowatts in our power grid almost all of it is delivered to our power plugs or dissipated as heat in the wires. Fields that escape are low power and don't travel very far.

Nice. It is possible to maybe build a filter and enhance the detection of these frequencies (50-60) range. However, I believe looking for the "Hydrosphere" frequencies of a given Habitable planet would be much better due to being able to find the "age" of the given planet and a guaranteed area of life for Homo Sapiens. The younger the planet, the better, If we are to travel to them and colonize just like North America etc.. One day, just like breaking the speed of "sound" (700 mph roughly) barrier on a given atmosphere, humans will be able to break the "light" (186,000 mps roughly) barrier in space. Just a dream to Chuck Yeager, who by the way, was given the credit to be the first Homo Sapien to do it in Antelope Valley, California, in a Bell X-1, during 1947 a.d.. Our planet is suppose to be around 4.6 Billion years old (Milky Way). In another 4 Billion years from now, its suppose to collide with the Andromeda Galaxy. Based on Doppler. Not good.
Your theory is interesting though, Earth being wired like a submarine or surface ship, thus able to be detected at long range. Even in a different medium like space instead of an ocean.

By the way, I believe the only reason why we use copper element as the medium for electrical use, is economy, i,e. its cheaper to produce. However, how do we know that other medium (element) like plastic or silicon or other types is much better to pass electromagnetic signals, in different frequencies for power etc? My opinion, highly advance (evolve) species would be probably be using something more efficient and effectively, whatever that is. As far as economy is concerned, how do we know that they (highly evolved species) measure survivabilty based on our kind of credit systems, if there are any? Fortunately, there are alot of different ideas out there since 1947 a.d. (gregorian calendar system) on how a highly evolved species would survive in a dangerous Universe filled with different kinds of energy (including planets, etc). After watching the movie "Contact" starring Jodie Foster, 1997 with my roomates last night, I basically started thinking of all the different possibilities that a highly evolved (Charles Darwin-Origin Species) would exist. The greatest question of all, "How did you do it?" referencing the question posed to Ancient Astronaut (E.T.) on how their species survived without destroying themselves. Another good movie is "Mission to Mars" 2000 a.d., especially at the end of the movie (Darwinsm with a twist).

E.T. probably will not be found using Seti@home. If my best gaussian score will not get better than 11.5 or my best triplet will not get better than 18.5, is there any hope of detecting something?

Maybe your right, maybe SETI@home won't succeed. But its a bit like buying a lottery ticket, there is always the hope that one day we will win!! And its a lot of fun trying.

In my personal opinion, will mankind ever succeed in finding other intelligent life out there in the universe??

I am 99.9% sure there is other intelligent life out there!! I just think its a matter of time. And this is my lottery ticket, I'm betting mankind will win and we will make contact. The whole universe is just full of life, i'm sure of it. Its just a matter of tuning into the right channel, in the right place, at the right time.

[…] the only reason why we use copper element as the medium for electrical use, is economy […].

Silver is a considerably better conductor, but much less abundant on this planet, making it expensive; in another star-system, depending on what kind of supernova debris was present in its early environment, the relative cost of metals might be completely different. Gold and aluminum are pretty good conductors as well.
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I think that that supernovae produce heavy elements at fairly predictable rates and we could expect roughly the same proportions of elements as we see in our local neighbourhood. It is also reasonable to assume that ET's home world went through a hot and molten stage in it's early evolution. Copper (atomic number 29) would be higher in the crust and generally more plentiful than Silver (47) or Gold (79).

Also, if we make the assumption that ET is at least a few decades and possibly hundreds/thousands of years in advance of us technologically, it should be a fairly safe net that they will have developed cost-effective super-conductive materials whose RF leakage properties we can only guess at.

Is there any idea how many megajoules of very low frequency photons that mankind radiates into space?

Surely any losses of the grid not radated as heat is radated as VLF photons.

I wanted to do a 10 minute presentation for my astrobio class this Friday.

I love the idea that our power grid radiates signal, but how much? I don’t even know where to look for paper for this kind of subject.

The other subject is how clear is the very frequency spectrum in space?

Obviously the CMB radiation is orders of magnitude above the very low frequency spectrum. Which means we don’t have to worry about big bang noise.

Leaving only star, star creation, and planet noise. I have a hard time thinking there are many natural processes that create a pure VLF signal for years at a time.

Even you had a part of the sun resonating at 50 hz, surely it vary greatly and change frequencies over time. Ideally we would be looking for a pure tone between 20 and 2000 hz which wouldn’t vary over time like natural processes.

Can anyone point me to a paper discussing lack/non-lack of astro-noise at very low frequencies?

Michael,
If you only read the messages posted by me in this thread, you will be able to extract a lot of information about the energy mankind transmits from our electrical power grids alone. By many orders of magnitude, mankind's use of electricity in our homes and industry is the loudest electromagnetic radiation signal being transmitted out from this planet. We would be easy to spot from the other side of the milkyway galaxy because of our use of 3 phase a.c. electricity.

If you were ET looking for other ET's, searching for 3 phase EM radiation from exoplanets would be the easiest way to find another civilization.

I don't know what the total kilowatts output from all mankind's electrical grids is, but you can be sure its big. It would run into the thousands, maybe millions of Gigawatt's. And i do my own science research, i don't know of any academic papers that discuss this topic. The EM signal coming from electrical power transmission grids is unique, there is nothing in nature like it because its 3 phases all 120 degrees out of phase with each other. The signal is very clear and very distinct. Only someone intelligent would be creating this type of signal. Your welcome to quote this forum message as a reference. I would be glad to answer any questions you have.

Well, your heart is in the right place but science isn’t based on intuition alone. We need hard numbers. For example, the three phase transmission scheme does self cancel quit a bit of noise, that’s the reason we use it.

Another person made an argument about AM radio being reflected by our atmosphere which is a good argument. Thought I’m not sure it applies. Most of the time AM radio is broadcasted vertically but our power grid is aligned horizontally. Meaning any leakage would be in the normal direction to the atmosphere ‘up’ and I would guess it would escape.

The third issue is the size of wavelength itself. It is in the 60,000,000 meter range. I don’t think anyone knows the propagation characteristics of a wavelength this large. It isn’t like anyone has went to space to measure it. We assume it propagates like AM radio but the wavelength is larger than our planet.

I’ll show you an example why we can’t assume things. We know black holes eat photons. That’s simple to understand, but what if the black hole has a 1000 km radius and the photon has a 60000 km wavelength? Can a black hole capture a photon much larger than its light consuming radius?

I would say that to see an object, getting some reflected wave from it, you have to illuminate it with a wavelength minor than the object's dimension, otherwise the wave just curves around it and is not reflected. This is true of any wave, not only an electromagnetic wave.
Tullio
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So true Tullio. A bat can "see" an insect smaller than one half inch (about 1 cm for youse guys).

So it's sonar must have a wavelength that is smaller than this. So taking the speed of sound at sea level of 330 meters/sec or so we know that v=fλ or f=v/λ so we have 30,000 cm/ 1 cm =33,000 cycles per second as a minimum. I suspect that bats emit perhaps 40,000 cycle per second sound.

Also the idea of the 60 cycle wave emitting as a photon is mind stretching. It would more realistically be described as a long, slow and lazy disturbance in both the electric and magnetic fields in the vacuum.

Can you detect it here on Earth ( 60 cycle power)?--I don't think so unless you turn up your old style amplifier and listen to the hum from your power supply ripple.